News

05/26/23Added Vault of the Vampire solution.
04/01/23Added Portal of Evil solution.
03/20/23Added Armies of Death solution.
02/08/23Reorganized and added links.
02/06/23Added Daggers of Darkness solution.
01/20/23Added Stealer of Souls solution.
11/10/22Added Shadow of the Giants solution.
11/02/22Added Sky Lord solution.
10/24/22Added Secrets of Salamonis solution.
10/14/22Added Slaves of the Abyss solution.
10/05/22Added Battleblade Warrior solution.
08/07/21Added Chasms of Malice solution.
07/30/21Added Midnight Rogue solution.
07/05/21Added Phantoms of Fear solution.
05/19/21Added Crystal of Storms solution.
04/29/21Added Star Strider solution.
05/16/20Added Crypt of the Sorcerer solution.
04/16/20Added Beneath Nightmare Castle solution.
03/31/20Added Clash of the Princes solutions.
03/08/20Added Creature of Havoc solution and artwork.
02/24/20Added Masks of Mayhem solution.
01/21/20Added Robot Commando solution.
09/22/19Added Assassins of Allansia solution.
09/05/19Added links.
02/24/19Clarified The Tasks of Tantalon solution.
02/22/19Added Trial of Champions solution.
02/15/19Added solutions for Sword of the Samurai and The Crown of Kings.
02/11/19Added solutions for Demons of the Deep and The Seven Serpents.
02/07/19Added solutions for Rebel Planet and Kharé - Cityport of Traps.
02/02/19Added solutions for Appointment with F.E.A.R and The Shamutanti Hills.
11/20/18Added Seas of Blood solution.
10/09/18Added Eye of the Dragon solution and added context in other solutions.
10/02/18Added The Rings of Kether solution.
09/30/18Added Temple of Terror solution.
09/26/18Added Bloodbones solution and clarified details in other solutions.
09/18/18Added Freeway Fighter solution.
09/13/18Added Space Assassin solution.
09/08/18Added Howl of the Werewolf solution.
08/12/18Added Talisman of Death solution.
07/03/18Added House of Hell solution.
06/24/18Added Stormslayer solution.
06/19/18Added Caverns of the Snow Witch solution.
05/13/18Added solutions for Scorpion Swamp and The Gates of Death.
04/21/18Added Island of the Lizard King solution and artwork.
04/16/18Cleaned solutions to remove ambiguity and mechanics, add context.
04/12/18Added several new solutions.
03/15/18Cleaned and added links.
06/30/12Moved the site to arek.bdmonkeys.net/FF.
08/01/03Added several new links.
03/27/03Cleaned links, added link to Fang's Finest Emporium.
06/22/02Added link to Wizard Books.
06/14/02Moved the site to homepage.mac.com/arekkusu/FF, cleaned dead links. Made minor updates such as noting that the books are being reprinted this summer, and replacing the missing solutions that Earthlink had nuked when I wasn't watching.
01/01/02Cleaned dead links.
07/07/01Added link to AdvancedFightingFantasy.com.
06/04/01Updated Links.
02/26/01Added link to Martin McKenna's site.
01/24/01Added link to AMYLASE.
01/14/01Added link to Andrew Chapman's site.
10/23/00Added link to the Shrine of Hamaskis.
09/29/00Added 13 pages from Casket of Souls to Artwork section.
09/19/00Cleaned broken/dead links. Worked on Blacksand map. Scanned Casket of Souls artwork.
08/23/00Added links to TomeHoard and The Black Tower.
07/04/00Added Starship Traveller solution and one picture to Artwork section.
04/16/00The Fighting Fantasy World is two years old! No updates lately since I've been working 80-100 hours/week. Eventually the whole site will be rewritten in XML so it works with current browsers.
02/06/00Updated Links and ratings. Worked on Blacksand map.
10/24/99Added Forest of Doom solution and MP3 of Legend of Zagor boardgame.
10/17/99Reverted code that broke IE4. Reworded Casket of Souls description to fit Windows font. Added two pictures to Artwork section. Discovered a new bug in Netscape 4.7 that breaks layout resizing on all platforms, investigating fix.
10/12/99Changed page loading function name from "load" (a reserved keyword) to "page" to allow subpage inheritance. Added solution index and Casket of Souls solution. Added sticky rollover highlights to sections, slightly improved code and security.
10/07/99English Casket of Souls arrived today, completing my collection! Added scan & back cover text to mosaic. Also replaced Titan with real scan of large-format edition.
09/29/99Added Kharé - Cityport of Traps to artwork section.
09/10/99Won the FF Award of Excellence for this month from Gilles Belanger's site. Worked on Forest of Doom solution and Blacksand map.
08/10/99Added Allansia map.
07/15/99Added House of Hell to Artwork section. Worked on Allansia map.
06/10/99Updated Links.
04/27/99Rearranged resize code to fix event capturing, also improved speed. Removed charset <META> tag since reencoding broke the Javascript. Viewing with an encoding other than ISO-8859-1 should work now.
04/16/99The Fighting Fantasy World is one year old! Updates might be infrequent for a while though, due to my new job.
04/05/99Reviewed code and removed half a kilobyte of whitespace at expense of readability. Fixed Link HTML, tweaked some descriptions.
04/02/99Added link to Yaztromo's FF Site. Added handlers for space (page down) and backspace (page up). These work on Windows too.
03/31/99Tweaked Links. Added handlers for page up, page down, home, end keys. They only work on Macintosh since Netscape doesn't expose navigation keys to Javascript on other platforms.
03/23/99Made the up/down scroll buttons repeat when held down, and hide when not needed. Optimized code slightly.
03/16/99Added four pictures to Artwork section, scanned more.
03/14/99Added link to The Horror of Craggen Rock. Fixed non-Javascript imagemap, tweaked page titles. Discovered that the Javascript function added to Artwork <HEAD> for backwards compatibility was overriding links on other pages, added dummy code to fix.
03/04/99Wrote code to generate Artwork template dynamically; keeping it backwards compatible got a little complicated, but after crashing Netscape a few dozen times it works. Redid title graphic, replacing painstakingly hand-drawn outline and shading with canned font and Photoshop layer effects. Added Artwork section and six pictures.
02/28/99Tweaked CSS fonts and two descriptions to fix clipping caused by cross-platform font differences. Increased mosaic JPEG smoothing to reduce grainyness. Reverted some code that broke under 4.0.x. Scanned and prepped some artwork.
02/23/99Added Citadel of Chaos solution and updated WoFTM solution to use active/passive phrasing. Prepared Artwork template and started new button graphics. Added link to Port Blacksand.
02/19/99Discovered a Netscape bug on the Macintosh platform which causes images in layers to be loaded separately even if the SRC is the same. This means an extra 500k is loaded. Investigating a workaround. Tweaked descriptions to lessen effect of Mac italicization spacing. Updated About page.
02/18/99Decided to do away with lo-rez mosaic and just scale down the hi-rez one. I didn't do this before since the aliasing makes some of the titles hard to read, but it turns out most are actually better than the lo-rez version because of the severe blurryness caused by JPEG compression. Anyway, it's 200k less to load. With only one mosaic graphic, Clash of the Princes has to be displayed side by side, so I removed Bloodbones to make room. Also resaved the hi-rez mosaic with slightly lower compression, so the graphics are better all around.
02/17/99Enlarged pop-up fonts. Added justification to About and solutions text. Replaced pop-up onMouseOut kludge with more event capturing. Made the pointer stay in synch when trying to drag the thumb past the scroll buttons. Cleaned some code.
02/14/99Changed the appearance of the pop-up. Cleaned more code. Made pop-up use LOWSRC which should let the small mosaic load first. Started capturing onMouseDown events to prevent dragging the border.
02/13/99Incorporated concepts from WebReference's example and greatly simplified the scrolling code. Cleaned up a few other parts, fixed a rare resizing bug. Changed the scroll buttons back to scrolling a constant amount. Adjusted Derek and colored his fur. Worked on Citadel of Chaos solution.
02/01/99Updated Links, made minor fix to Tantalon solution. Removed reference to Macintosh version of Deathtrap Dungeon game. WebReference recently posted scrollbar Javascript so I will revisit my code and make some improvements, when I have time.
11/15/98Updated Links.
10/22/98Added link to Worlds of Wonder. Added solution to The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Updated About page.
10/14/98Added link to Abandon Art. Prepared solution template. Worked on Firetop Mountain map a little. Fixed some details.
10/05/98Fixed image map for Javascript-enabled non-Netscape browsers. Added extra check to resize handler. Added links where possible to author info. Updated Deathtrap Dungeon description. Optimized code a little. Constructed armory (reference 155) for Firetop Mountain map.
09/30/98Moved the site to www.jps.net/arekusu/FF, updated search engines.
09/05/98Scanned and added the Japanese version of Casket of Souls, which was generously sent by V-Boost a while ago. Tweaked scrolling values a little. Replaced link to the Green Boar Tavern with one to WebRPG. Started work on a map of Firetop Mountain using scans of Dungeon Floor Plans, but put on hold due to work/living conditions.
06/14/98Warlocks arrived yesterday, completing the set. Scanned and added them to the mosaic and updated the info. I am graduating from college this week, so the site will eventually be moved to another server.
06/03/98Fixed typo, the page should load correctly with non-Netscape 4 browsers now. Fixed a clipping bug which occured with small browser windows.
05/28/98Added frame killer, and image map so links work in non-Netscape 4 browsers. Found a secondhand store in the UK with issues of Warlock.
05/19/98Added About page and solution to The Tasks of Tantalon. Wrote keypress hander to tie arrow keys to scroll buttons. Also fine-tuned some small details.
05/15/98Added scan of Deathtrap Dungeon (mousepad), and edited info for missing items. Started work on About page.
05/11/98Added the rest of the hi-rez books; the mosaic is done for now. Updated Links and made other minor tweaks. Received mail from www.bookstore.co.uk saying the publishing date for Bloodbones is not yet set.
05/07/98Changed from CSS layers to <LAYER>, which allows an onLoad handler to update the scrollbar appropriately for dynamic content, and also fixes some of the problems when resizing the window. Fixed the rest of the problems with an onResize handler and some extra scrollbar code. Also made things a little better for non-Netscape 4 browsers and cleaned up the code a bit.
05/03/98Fixed the scrolling code so thumb offsets work, added graphics for the up and down scroll buttons, and changed them to scroll 1/4th of the visible area instead of a constant amount. Also edited and added a few more hi-rez books.
04/25/98Legend of Zagor boardgame arrived yesterday. Scanned it and added it in, after rearranging things a little. Removed the Adventure Soft games to set aside space for Bloodbones and the new Deathtrap Dungeon game. Also added hi-rez Titan and some Warlocks. Played Zagor with roommates- it's okay but I prefer Warlock as it is closer to the gamebooks and the Zagor electronic voice quickly becomes annoying. The miniatures are nice though, I might paint them when I have time.
04/19/98Fixed CSS bug in external content files, worked in a kludge to make onMouseOut work with the pop-up mosaic info. Registered with search engines.
04/16/98Created title graphic and integrated into the border. Tweaked News & Links content to display better. Public launch!
04/10/98Edited and incorporated many books into the mosaic. Rescanned Derek and colorized him. Built border graphics. Also found Bloodbones purportedly available at www.bookstore.co.uk.
04/04/98Scanned remaining books for hi-rez versions.
04/03/98Tested on Win95/NT, SGI, and HP for compatibility: it seems there is a difference in CSS font-size unit implementation; played with things until they looked okay everywhere. Windows also has lower gamma than other platforms so everything looks too dark, but that can't be fixed.
04/01/98Demonstealer arrived. Fixed scrolling, but having some problems figuring out how to load a layer with an external file and use onLoad to refresh the scrollbar.
03/29/98Went through all book descriptions and fixed info. Built new DHTML with placeholder graphics, scrolling is buggy though.
03/26/98Found DemonStealer at www.sentrybox.com, came up with new interface design.
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